Chapter 13 Goodfellas #2
“Fine, we all think Harry did it,” I said, exasperated. “Maybe he was trying to send me a message.”
“Do you mean he put it there before Kenny died?” asked Mr. Barker.
“Sure. It was like, Look, Mira, you wanted the target gone, here it is!”
“No,” argued my father. “No. If Harry did it, he definitely put it in Mira’s bag afterward. Not before. Cleon, fine: we use the word framed. I was wrong. Harry wanted to frame Mira and absolve himself of the blame.”
My lawyer was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Well, we will need to tell the jury something. We will need an alternate explanation to the idea you cut off the target and stuck it in your golf bag. And maybe that’s it. Mira, did you bring your bag home the Thursday Kenny died?”
I thought back to that day. “No. Actually, I didn’t. I…”
“Go on.”
“I didn’t see it again for weeks. When Kenny died…I’m not sure what I did with it afterward. But someone brought it to the club’s bag room for me. Maybe two weeks later, Mom went to the club and brought it home. She was still hoping I’d bring the clubs to Yale and keep playing.”
“We were all hoping that,” my father said.
“Well, there’s our story,” said Mr. Barker, and he sounded happy for the first time on the call. “That’s what we tell the jury. That’s how we sow reasonable doubt. Anyone could have put the target in your bag those weeks.”
“Anyone,” said my father, his tone a little somber now, “but most likely Harry Fallows.”
“What we will make clear in our criminal defense is that the only one who is not at fault in this sad case is your daughter—is you, Mira. The negligence and breach of duty are on the part of the manufacturer, the country club, and that club pro. Fallows may not have been at the club that Caddy Day, but we will still suggest or hint or imply as much as we can that he was indeed the one who tore the target off the net.”
I hadn’t seen Fallows since the afternoon I had killed Kenny Foster. “It will be weird to be in the courtroom with him,” I said.
“You think he’ll have to testify?” my father asked Mr. Barker.
“I’m not sure what could be gained from our putting him on the stand in the criminal case. He could just deny taking the target down, and there is no way he’d admit to stashing it in Mira’s golf bag.”
“Might the district attorney use him?”
“Very likely.”
“What about Curt?” I asked.
“Curt Bolger? The assistant?” asked Mr. Barker.
“Yes. Maybe Harry asked him to do it. And then when Kenny died, Curt stuck it in my bag.”
“Okay. We’ll test those waters. But, just like with your pro, putting him on the stand does us absolutely no good if he just denies it. Never ask a question you don’t know the answer to.”
Through the phone, I heard my father swirling the ice in his tumbler of scotch.
“When does Mira leave for Smith?” Mr. Barker asked.
“Next week,” my father replied.
“Obviously, we won’t have a plea deal by then—if that’s where we go. The negotiations will continue into the fall. And if there’s a trial, it won’t be until late winter or early spring.”
“And then there’s the civil trial,” I said.
“Correct. The civil trial will be after that—again, if no one settles and there is one. So, none of this should have any effect on your classes, Mira.”
Of course it would. It was cavalier to think for even a moment that a girl not yet twenty wouldn’t lose focus with an involuntary manslaughter trial looming. “What’s the penalty if I were found guilty?”
“You don’t need to worry about that,” my father said before Mr. Barker could answer.
“Tell me,” I demanded.
“Criminally negligent homicide is what’s called a Class E felony. Worst case is four years in prison, but that would never happen to you. It’s not like you were speeding in the wrong direction on a one-way street and ran over some kid on a tricycle.”
“No,” I agreed. “I didn’t do that.”
“And even if you were convicted, you probably wouldn’t spend a day in jail.”
“Probably? Or definitely?”
“Nothing is ever definite. But it’s not very likely. You’d be looking at a fine, maybe. A few grand. You have no criminal history, and how many people ever check a practice net before using it? Answer? None.”
“Sure, but there are other issues, Cleon,” my father said.
“If Mira pleads out, it means she’s a convicted felon.
Second, it really helps the Foster family with their civil case.
A few grand criminal penalty would be pocket change compared to what we—well, Mira, but we’d pay it—might end up owing in the civil case. ”
“That’s true,” my lawyer agreed, and again there was quiet on the line.
“I’ll tell you another reason not to plead out,” I said finally, taking a little control of this madness. “Because I didn’t do it. I never touched the target on the net. Not once and not ever. And I sure didn’t wad it up afterward and stick it in my golf bag.”
Without the internet, the woman who would be my roommate at Smith had no idea that she had drawn the short straw having to share a room with me.
In August, the college gave us each the other’s home address and telephone number, and I had no plans to call Tina Hawthorne from Jericho, Vermont.
But she called my home the night I had a mug shot taken and pressed my thumbs into ink.
The mug shot is not a terrible photo: I look a little frightened, but I had done a solid job on my hair and makeup.
The fingerprinting was a little dicey, because I couldn’t stop my hands from shaking.
But I got through it. When Tina called, I was watching Merv Griffin, just as I had some nights when I had been living with my aunt and uncle in Manhattan.
I was, after the trauma of that day, very stoned.
Tina volunteered that she was bringing a stereo, liked the band Pure Prairie League, had been to Montreal and Boston but never New York City, and wanted to know which of us should bring curtains.
She sounded chipper and young, and was clearly excited by the idea of college.
She had no idea yet that, though only a year older than her, I had already killed a boy with a golf ball, broken up a marriage, and had a brief affair with a novelist who had a book that was perhaps taught in English classes at the very college where we both would be living in a couple of weeks.
I had a feeling that my search for weed and blow in Northampton was going to appall her.
After all, she asked if I drank. Sometimes, she admitted, she had beer.
I admitted that, too, though for me sometimes was now almost never: keggers and beer were things in my past. My present was the sorts of booze my parents drank, disco biscuits, cocaine, and marijuana.
“Do you ski?” she asked me.
“A little. Not like you, I guess,” I answered.
“I’m okay. I wasn’t on the team in high school. The girls who ski at my school are practically Olympic-caliber amazing. We’re a feeder for really good college programs. But I did play soccer and softball. What about you? What sports did you play? What teams?”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh, were you a theater kid?”
“No,” I said. The idea crossed my mind that I should say something silly like chess club or the math team, but when she discovered I was pulling her leg, I’d look only mean.
And while I have many faults, I hope I never was and never am mean.
(Unless, of course, you categorize the obliviousness that wealth gives you as meanness.
If you do, then I was a pretty typical Tallmadge cunt.)
“Got it. Me neither. I don’t want to be pushy, but what did you like to do in high school?”
Most of my possible answers were not going to endear me to my new roommate, and I had the belief that the longer I postponed sharing my fundamental toxicity, the greater the chances it might never rear its Medusa-like head.
“Oh, this and that. I used to play golf, but I think I’m done with that for now. ”
“I’ve heard it’s a really hard game,” she said agreeably, as if my answer had implied it was too difficult for me and that was why I had quit.
“It is,” I said.
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“I don’t.”
“I did,” said Tina, “but we’ve decided that we should see other people, at least at first. His name is Booth, which sounds weird, but it’s a family name. He’s going to UVM.”
“Uh-huh.”
“My mom says it will be fun to meet new boys. She has been teasing me ever since I got in that all the Amherst boys will be very sophisticated. Did you date a lot of boys in Tallmadge?”
I must have been silent a long while, deciding how to respond, because she said, “Mira? You still there?”
“Yeah. I am. And, um, no, I really didn’t date any boys in Tallmadge. At least not very seriously.”
“Oh,” she said, and she sounded sad for me. I think until we met she feared that her roommate was a Jehovah’s Witness.
Well. I sure showed her.
My continued fall from grace—my spiraling down the stairs and getting charged with involuntary manslaughter—did not go unnoticed in Tallmadge.
Marie Morris saw Frank Pendleton at a kegger before they returned to college, Marie a sophomore and Frank a senior, and he told her with glee he made no effort to hide, “I hear her habit of vandalizing other people’s shit has finally caught up to her.
Tearing the target off the driving range net?
Selfish and stupid. Guess she didn’t learn her lesson after she fucked up my car. ”